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How To Manage Strawberry Plant Pests

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Strawberry plants produce sweet tasting fruit throughout the summer months, which is why most homeowners and gardeners are so drawn to cultivating them. However, the fruit that they produce also attracts a wide variety of pests into your garden which can lay waste to your strawberry plants if left unchecked. Thankfully, there are a few simple things that you can do to keep away the most common types of strawberry plant pests.

Slugs

Slugs love to feast on ripe strawberries, but they tend to be nocturnal, which can make identifying an infestation a fairly difficult process. In order to determine if you have slugs in your garden, you should inspect your strawberries for small holes that go deep into the berry. Slime trails will usually stain the leaves on the plant as well. If you do think that you have slugs in your garden that are eating your strawberry plants, you should remove any mulch or detritus which may have built up underneath your plants which can provide a breeding ground for slugs. In addition, you can leave out citrus peels (lemon, lime, orange, or grapefruit) overnight to attract slugs to those instead. Simply remove the peels in the morning to reduce the slug population around your strawberries.

Spittlebugs

Like their odd name would seem to suggest, these bugs actually produce a sort of foam when they're infesting your strawberries. This foam will appear at the base of your plant stem, and the bugs will hide within it and feed off of the juices inside the stem. In order to remove them, you should simply squish them by hand. While an infestation can cause short term damage to your strawberries, by being vigilant and squishing spittlebugs regularly they should recover.

Strawberry Weevils

Strawberry weevils are extremely small, red or brown bugs that feed off of and lay eggs within your strawberry plants, greatly reducing the amount of strawberries that you'll be able to eat. You should check your strawberry plants as soon as they start to bud for signs of weevils: eggs that have a weevil egg within them will either fall off of the plant prematurely, before the bud has a chance to bloom, or will simply hang dead from the plant. You should remove them as soon as possible to keep the weevil population in check. Further, you may want to look for an insecticidal soap to spray liberally on your plants if you notice a large amount of weevils or buds that have been infested: most garden supply stores will have a general purpose soap that won't damage your plants or other insects in your garden.

For more help, talk with a company like Suffolk Pest Control today.


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